Both horror films and dreams utilize sudden "uncanny" juxtapositions, altered temporal perception and skewed narratives in order to address from a "distance" matters of repressed desire. Both operate within parameters analogous to a mechanism of cathartic control: that via the "safe" release of repressed desire, the organism will return to homeostasis.
The horror film often utilizes a relationship transference of viewer to protagonist and agonist; a slippage, or inversion of the roles of sender and receiver (as in the "slasher film" point-of-view shift from third-person "camera-eye" to first person "maniac")1. The focus here is on this slippage/inversion, the rejection/exhaustion of context on the part of filmmakers, and the simultaneous breakdown and resurrection of "traditional" gender roles and power dynamics.
In John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (the "monstrous feminine" clear from the title) and Wes Craven's New Nightmare, it is attempted, via self-conscious strategies, to dissolve the safely distancing "screen" that separates audience/voyeur from cinematic object/desire. Carpenter's film shows a male's reality fragmented under the power of another male's sexually chaotic reality. In New Nightmare, the film's real-world director speaks to the audience about the filmmaking process, and in so doing, breaks the tacit agreement between film and viewer, bringing to (filmic) life, horror icon Freddy Krugar. In both films, the limits of traditional narrative law are transgressed, one supposes, because the audience has become inured over time to visual monstrosity, and so "needs" this anarchic "kick."
More likely, that audience has become "dulled" via a special effects-infused cinema that replaces coherent narrative with constant sensory input, with the "horrors" of the biological (read: female) paradigm nullified in the process. Thus, hyperreal visuals and a lack of personal or spatial "gravity" within the frame are invoked as a replacement for a disintegrating male power structure/narrative-base, which, despite its negative attributes, does posit a communal and intersocial context not yet solidified in feminist discourse. With nothing to replace this structure, (however undesirable it may be), it is of little surprise when both film's male characters fall prey to either psychic or corporeal dissolution.
Recent efforts see a new sort of slippage occurring, with "cyberspace" as the field of operation. In Strange Days (ostensibly an SF thriller, but one that gains its strongest effects in the register of horror), identity slippage is taken one visceral step further.
Echoing in high tech terms the central ploy of Peeping Tom, Strange Days' plot centers on the illegal trafficking of first-hand, recorded sexual/violent images. Our points of interest here are two very graphic rape scenes, viewed by the audience through the eyes of an on-screen character viewing a "recording" of the rape.
Directed by a woman (Katherine Bigelow), what we see, in effect, is a woman/artist's "vision" of the "memory" of a man raping a woman being watched by an audience primarily drawn to the film by the sex appeal of its star Ralph Fiennes, who gained fame in Schindler's List, playing a curiously attractive Nazi.
Strange Days' advertising tag line?
You know you want it.
But "who" is the "you" in this context? Or "it"? Baudrillaud posits that "the savage, like the savage part of us, has no reflection"2 , and further states, using an archaic reference, that "photography is our exorcism."3
But in the Corporate world of sensorium minus context, questions of even marginal identity or catharsis are replaced by intrinsically inert systems of stimulation. Unlike slasher films, Strange Days appears to be striving to eliminate detachment from primal scene fantasies via a chaotic mise en scene that locates the viewer in a contextureless "nowhere," or beneath layers of irony. Implicit in Bigelow's film is an auto-critique of the assumption of the male gaze as the primary gender designate in the voyeuristic act. But also negated is the cathartic value of seeing (and metaphorically) surviving the forbidden.
Even more significantly, the raped woman in Strange Days appears to enjoy her defilement. Unlike Peeping Tom or Psycho, no psychoanalytic "backstory" is present to explain her "pleasure" : here, it is assumed everybody, male or female, "wants it," with "it" consistently manifesting itself as a child's rage at the metaphorical sight of the act of its own conception. In Bigelow's cyberscape, "wanting it" is literally an addiction, with every Body female, and every viewer a worst-case scenario male.
What is made explicit in Strange Days' hyperactively "unmotivated" editing, time-shifts and point-of-view changes, is that the electric sensuality of medium is what matters, with rape just another kinetic element in the visceral circus of the film's mise en scene. It is a milieu empty of behavioral context for either sex, eschewing any psychoanalytical, moralistic or ethical considerations.
Though seemingly transgressive, the abandonment of patriarchal/psychological/narrative strictures is negated by the film's finale. The "recovering" vision-addict and his abstaining black girlfriend emerge victorious from the conflict of "bad seeing" and embrace amidst a visual field of obvious orgasmic indicators: fireworks, balloons exploding, rains of confetti, etc.
But Bigelow cancels any coherent reading by having this victory be achieved via the last-minute help of an older white male. The weary protagonists gather in the protective embrace of this "corporate" male savior, suggesting some terror-driven return (after all that sexual imagery) to some male-controlled, metaphoric non-womb existing in a gender-neutral cyberspace, free of the horrors of identity slippage, and any female "complication."
And so in Strange Days and other current fantastic cinema, it is implied we now, in preference to the "horror" of the biological/narrative contract, desire instead a context/complication-free sensorium analogous to "the erotic fever among the recovered victims who, instead of fleeing the the city, stay where they are, trying to wrench criminal pleasure from the dead."4
NOTES
1. Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, Cambridge Unniversity Press, 1990, p 22.
2. Jean Baudrillaud, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, Verso Books, UK, 1993. pp 151-152.
3. Ibid.
4. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, Grove Weidenfeld, 1958, p 24.
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